We’ve been interviewing for several senior roles recently. Of course, appointments are absolutely critical to any organisation, and the process holds up an interesting mirror if we care to look in it. We ensure that there are interviews, tasks and written elements with several panels, groups and individuals, including students, teachers, leaders, board, parents. The diversity of these groups is important – and it means that the feedback is equally diverse and fascinating to parse.
Sometimes all the indicators align and a decision is very easy; sometimes there are strong but opposing views between panels; sometimes there is inconsistency between what we see in interview and what we hear from referees; sometimes candidates are markedly better/worse on specific tasks or elements of the process. In these cases, things are much harder. As the final selection panel is the only group with all the (contradictory) information, the final decision may be hard to understand from the outside.
I was once in a school where the Chair of the Board visited the schools where two finalists were working, to see first hand what they had achieved and how they were perceived in the communities where they had worked for many years. That seemed like a good idea to me – and indeed an outstanding Head was appointed in that case – but it’s not a scalable approach.
One of the things that makes the process so tricky is that the expectations on senior leaders these days are formidable. Ellis (2014) noted that leaders need to be humble and strong, decisive and willing to listen to the ideas of others, confident and vulnerable, tough and compassionate, detached and sensitive. To that I might add symbolic and substantive; absolutely fair while also being sensitive to particular circumstances; to have the strategic big picture while also having great attention to detail. Small wonder that different groups sometimes rate candidates very differently.
The strongest leaders are well aware of these paradoxes, and the most successful seem to find one of two ways to address them.
The first way is to tightrope between the two poles – which is to say that they can find the ‘midpoint’. It sounds very reasonable, and willingness to compromise is an essential quality but I have always struggled to understand that… what, for example, does halfway between being decisive and willing to listen mean…. being quite decisive? Willing to listen a bit?
The second way is to embrace the contradiction; researchers Denison, Hooijberg, & Quinn argue that leaders familiar and comfortable with paradox can exhibit contrary or opposing behaviors as appropriate or necessary while still retaining some measure of integrity, credibility, and direction. That seems to me to capture the paradoxes here in it’s own paradox – and while has the ring of truth to me, it’s also a hard pill to swallow – that the best leaders can be inconsistent and self-contradictory, while genuinely retaining and authentically projecting their own integrity. Wow, no wonder recruitment for senior roles is so difficult!
But perhaps we can be a bit kinder here…. it’s too easy to expect perfection from candidates and be let down when they turn out to be human and fallible. In today’s rather star-struck celebrity culture we may expect to find someone who will have all the answers – but that’s a myth, and perhaps we need to be more realistic. Writer Anaïs Nin put it well: Those who see giants are still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.
